President Bill Clinton with First Lady Hillary Clinton prior to addressing students from Norristown High School in Pennsylvania in 1999.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Thousands of pages of records from the Clinton presidency will be made public Friday, potentially offering fresh insights into Hillary Clinton as she considers whether to run for president in 2016.

The National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, said that beginning 1 p.m. EST on Friday, the Clinton presidential library will post on its website up to 5,000 pages of material that had been previously withheld.

The papers are part of a cache of 33,000 pages of Clinton presidential records that had been withheld from various public records requests because they were exempt from disclosure under the law governing presidential records.

The documents had been held back for two legal reasons: they involved appointments to federal office and they contained confidential advice between the president and his advisers, the Archives said in a statement.

After those exemptions expired, the Archives said it notified the Obama White House and former President Bill Clinton’s representatives that it intended to release the records. Both camps then conducted what the Archives called a “privilege review.”

Earlier in the week, the White House and Mr. Clinton’s office “approved the release of the majority” of the 33,000 pages that had been kept secret, according to the Archives.

Additional documents are to be made public in the coming weeks.

“Our goal is to make these records available as soon as possible, but it will take the Clinton Library and NARA additional time to complete the logistics of making available such a large release, including being able to make the records available on the web,” the Archives said.

The records could round out the portrait of Mrs. Clinton as an active first lady who was a powerful policy and political adviser to her husband. After her husband entered office, Mrs. Clinton took charge of an ultimately unsuccessful effort to revamp the nation’s health-care system – an issue that remains timely today given the ongoing controversy over the Affordable Care Act.

Republican opposition researchers are certain to mine the records for anything that might undercut a Hillary Clinton presidential bid.

It’s unclear, though, whether any of the records will prove as revealing as a separate cache of documents donated to the University of Arkansas by a former friend of Mrs. Clinton – the late Diane Blair.

Earlier this month, the Washington Free Beacon, an online news site, published documents from the Blair papers showing Mrs. Clinton’s candid views of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and other difficult moments in her husband’s presidency.

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